Most Things Haven't Worked Out is an album by the American musician Junior Kimbrough, released in 1997.[1][2] It was his third album for Fat Possum Records and the last before his 1998 death.[3]
Production
All of the album's songs were written by Kimbrough, who generally did not cover the material of other musicians.[4] He elected to keep his mistakes and missed notes on the tracks.[5] Three of the tracks were recorded at his Mississippi juke joint.[6]John Hermann helped produce a few of the songs.[7]Kenny Brown served as the second guitarist.[8] The title track is an instrumental.[9]
The Village Voice wrote: "Lurking beneath an ostensibly primitive surface are suggestions of jazz-inflected bluesmen like Robert Jr. Lockwood."[16]Guitar Player determined that "there's a deeply hypnotic quality to Junior Kimbrough's old-as-all-of-time slow blues, perfected over a lifetime of playing jukes around Holly Springs, Mississippi."[17] The St. Louis Post-Dispatch said that "Kimbrough plays the blues to mesmerize, with elements that give trance, ambient/techno and dub its entrainment and rock and roll its visceral claw and kick."[18]
The Washington Post noted that "Kimbrough has a soft spot for love songs and slowly grinding dance grooves."[19] The Boston Herald concluded that "what sounds primitive at first gains unexpected power through repetition and deceptively sophisticated shifts of texture, tone and rhythm."[10]Robert Christgau praised "Lonesome Road".[11]
